creators

Kyunghyun Cho - NYU professor, GRU and attention

Kyunghyun Cho co-wrote the 2014 papers introducing the GRU and attention-based translation. He is an NYU professor and returned there full time in January 2026.

Kyunghyun Cho is a professor of computer science and data science at New York University, where he holds the Glen de Vries Professorship of Health Statistics at the Courant Institute and co-directs the Global AI Frontier Lab with Yann LeCun. He took his bachelor's degree at KAIST and his master's and doctorate at Aalto University in Finland. As a postdoctoral researcher with Yoshua Bengio in Montreal he co-wrote the two 2014 papers that introduced the gated recurrent unit and attention-based neural machine translation; the second, with Dzmitry Bahdanau, put into sequence models the attention mechanism the Transformer would later build on. He co-founded Prescient Design, a machine-learning antibody-design company, in 2021, and Genentech acquired it the same year. He stayed on as executive director of frontier research and senior fellow until 16 January 2026, writing on his own site that he was returning to NYU full time. He won the Samsung Ho-Am Prize for Engineering in 2021.

Specialization

natural language processing, machine translation, deep learning, machine learning for biology

Country

United States